An Analysis Of The Dynamic Nature Of Text-a Systemic-functional Approach To Discourse Analysis

Text is the major medium of people's communication and generally considered as a social and cultural phenomenon. People participate in the social communicative activity through text. Along with the deepening of linguistic research, more and more scholars are focusing their attention on it. Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL)is a theory specializing in analyzing and understanding some specific text. It is widely applied in discourse analysis to explore the intra-relationship among paragraphs and sentences and interpret the meaning and writing style of a textThis thesis attempts to make an overall investigation of the dynamic nature of text from a viewpoint of SFL. Beyond the scope of SFL, there are several linguists who have noticed the dynamic nature. Some of them define text from a dynamic viewpoint. Some make their research on text in pragmatic and cognitive approach.In this thesis, the study of dynamic nature of text will be from the following aspects: context and the intra-structures of textual metafunction. Halliday divided context into two categories:cultural context and situational context. Cultural context and text have an interacting relationship. Text will diverge according to different cultural context. Situational context can be sub-classified into field, tenor and mode. The change of each variable will change the text accordingly. The sub-systems of textual metafunction are thematic structure, information structure and cohesion. The Themes and Rhemes of sentences in a text enhance the textual development in different patterns. In addition, the interaction between the Given and the New forms the information flow of a text. In this sense, thematic progression and information progression in a text are both dynamic processes. Reference is one of the most important cohesive devices. The recognition, production and interpretation of reference and its referent should be a dynamic logical reasoning process or the text can not be well understood. Through the above analysis, the dynamic nature of text can be displayed from structure to meaning and from macro-viewpoint to micro-viewpoint.